Mark Applebaum, Ph.D. is the Edith & Leland Smith Professor of Composition at Stanford University. His solo, chamber, choral, orchestral, operatic, and electroacoustic work has been performed throughout North and South America, Europe, Australia, Africa, and Asia, including notable commissions from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Fromm Foundation, the Spoleto Festival, the Kronos Quartet, Chamber Music America, Ensemble Talea, and the Vienna Modern Festival. Many of his pieces are characterized by challenges to the conventional boundaries of musical ontology: works for three conductors and no players, a concerto for florist and orchestra, pieces for instruments made of junk, notational specifications that appear on the faces of custom wristwatches, works for an invented sign language choreographed to sound, amplified Dadaist rituals, silent “potential” music that allow listeners to infer sound, a chamber work comprised of obsessive page turns, and a 72-foot long graphic score displayed in a museum and accompanied by no instructions for its interpretation. His TED talk has been seen by more than five million viewers. Applebaum is also an accomplished jazz pianist and builds electroacoustic sound-sculptures out of junk, hardware, and found objects, and he has been awarded by the American Academy of Arts & Letters. At Stanford Applebaum is the founding director of [sic]—the Stanford Improvisation Collective. He is a member of the board of trustees at Carleton College and has served on the board of Other Minds.